Tsuyoshi Nagabuchi -- Good Bye Seishun（GOOD-BYE青春）

 

Welcome to Monday! I was looking down the Oricon Top 50 singles for 1983 on J-Wiki and perhaps not all that surprisingly, we've managed to cover pretty much all of them in the 14+ years that "Kayo Kyoku Plus" has been in existence.

However, one that I had yet to cover was singer-songwriter and actor Tsuyoshi Nagabuchi's（長渕剛）"Good Bye Seishun" (Good Bye Youth) which ended up as the 49th-ranked single of 1983 after hitting No.5 on the Oricon weeklies following its release in September 1983. Strangely enough, the intro for "Good Bye Seishun" was familiar to me so I had heard it sometime in the past as it reminded me a bit of "El Condor Pasa", and indeed, Nagabuchi had based the melody on Central and South American songs created into this folk-rock tune.

Yasushi Akimoto（秋元康）was responsible for the lyrics which don't give a particular happy glow to someone's days of youth. It seems like the protagonist went through some very hard times as a teenager and is more than happy to wash his hands of all of it before taking those steps into adulthood. Still, the song is plenty jaunty.

"Good Bye Seishun" was Nagabuchi's first major hit since his 1980 "Junko"（順子）. It not only got him more appearances on television but it was also used as the theme song for the 1983 TBS drama "Kazoku Game"（家族ゲーム...The Family Game） which was also a starring vehicle for him.